Josh Marshall Profile picture
Apr 10, 2020 6 tweets 1 min read Read on X
Since it's come up again, let me speak to the supplies seizure issue. The key issue is chaos and shortages. Everyone is scrambling. If you talk to hospital execs and public officials having orders interdicted or rerouted isn't just happening it's now commonplace.
2/ You hunt high and low for supplies and when you get lucky and find some there's a good chance the feds will swoop in and redirect or seize them. Now why that's happening, on what authority and to what purpose isn't clear. A significant amount of it may simply be ...
3/ confusion. In some cases it's likely or possible some federal official is deciding it's more important that it go to hotspot X than the place that ordered it. A lot of it is likely that the White House has unleashed various bureaucratic players and they're each trying to ...
4/ get as much as they can though on their own they're all doing something like what they think is the right thing. The key issue is that it all remains highly opaque and front line users of goods are simultaneously being told to buy their own and having the stuff they ...
5/ buy snatched away from them with some regularity. Layered over this a significant amount of distribution is being allocated on the basis of praise and personal relationships through the President and Jared Kushner. Fundamentally this is about chaos and lack of ...
6/ transparency and in that muddle some amount of corruption and political patronage gaming is finding a congenial environment. The admin needs to provide clarity abt what it's doing.

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More from @joshtpm

Oct 28
Obviously this is who Trump is and this is what Trumpism is. But there's part of this that isn't widely enough known, tho it's well-known to a lot of reporters. And that is among GOP operatives and staffers under 30 or so the majority, maybe the great majority had their ...
2/ political awakenings on sites like 4chan, 8chan, various far-right, incel and incel adjacent online communities. It crops up in various ways if you know where to look. It's why DeSantis had those weird frankly homoerotic campaign vids during the primaries.
3/ They're all awash in this world of casual racism, ironic provocation, not just misogyny but a weird emotionally-stunted kind of misogyny that to normal people isn't just often either offensive or weird but even kind of inexplicable because it's a very weird ...
Read 12 tweets
Oct 26
I think a lot of people are actually canceling their wapo subs. It’s not like the usual round of claims. But I think the brand damage to the Post may be greater than people realize and go beyond the near term hit on subs. A big slice of America is living in a climate of ….
2/ bewilderment. It’s basically Blue America or the more politicized part of Blue America and it’s tied to the role of billionaires in public life, Trumps role in our public life. The recent revelations about Elon Musk have confirmed the way that he now exists way outside …
3/ even the most limited sort of public accountability. This isn’t new info. But Musk has raised it to the level of a kind of performance art. You can’t not see it. Just as you can’t not see the fact that Trump is running around the country acting like a degenerate fascist madman …
Read 10 tweets
Oct 14
This is something I’ve written about from a few vantage points over recent years. Going to try to put a longer piece together on it. This trend is real. And it’s not surprising. Some of it of course is the experience of seeing Trump twice over perform his polls. But the …
2/ reality going back a couple decades now is that Dems always think they’re going to lose and Republicans always think they’re going to win. That’s the consistent through line in all races even though of course the actual outcomes vary. It’s the flip side of partisan …
3/ sorting generating one deeply authoritarian party. That’s not just Trump and not just ideology. There’s some very good political science work on the fact that authoritian minded voters used to be fairly even spread across both parties. Then starting in the 90s that …
Read 7 tweets
Oct 12
Completely fascinated by this technology. Partly because I work with wood a lot. But the real thing is the potential climate implications. The short version is that it transforms wood into a substance substantially stronger than steel … inventwood.com/mettlewood
2/ and dramatically lighter than steel. Its inventors believe it could replace about 80% of steel and concrete used in construction. That’s a big deal because construction materials and especially concrete make up about something like 11% of all carbon emissions.
3/ Concrete is a hugely carbon intensive production process, largely because of the heating involved. This is “embodied carbon” which you hear a lot about if you’re involved in the somewhat niche world of green construction. In any case, the engineering process is quite …
Read 8 tweets
Oct 10
Everybody who is maybe kinda possibly thinking Donald Trump is doing a rally in Madison Sq Garden is an electoral play: It's not. Donald Trump may win in a landslide. He still won't come close to winning New York State. A small part of this is a bluff. The real driver is that ..
2/ Donald Trump wants to hold a rally at MSG. That's the whole thing. To him, that's making it. That's real. MSG is real. I don't think the exurban and rural venues he hits in swing and red states are way out in the middle of bumfuck. But I guarantee you Donald Trump does.
3/ For all the Florida nonsense, NYC is Trump's home town. All his visions of success and failure are housed there. As blue as New York is NYC and Westchester and Long Island have tons of Trumpers way more than enough to fill MSG a bunch of times. And that's why it's ...
Read 4 tweets
Oct 9
I’ve been doing some ad hoc research on this. It’s growing very quickly. It picks up on the marginal use of cloud seeding which has been around for decades as well as theoretical and still fairly controversail study of geo engineering as a way to combat climate change …
2/ In other words, these are the fact smidgens which are adduced to make the conspiracy theories sound plausible to deeply stupid people. The more interesting part of this to me is that the last two or 3-5 years plus the back to back hurricanes of recent days has clearly …
3/ passed a threshold of people thinking: okay, something is changing with the climate and changing in a bad way. Like this isn’t normal. Something happened. But perhaps predictably for many in the MAGA thought world the conclusion is not: damn, climate change is real. It’s
Read 4 tweets

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